Is Apple Suggesting That The DMCA Prevents Terrorism?

from the yeah,-that's-believable dept

The EFF is trying to get a DMCA exemption from the Library of Congress for people who jailbreak their iPhones (if history is any indication, this won't happen -- the Library of Congress never seems to care about consumer rights). However, Apple's response to the Library of Congress, suggesting that open or jailbroken iPhones could be used by terrorists to bring down cell towers is both preposterous and totally unrelated to the issue at hand. First it's preposterous, as there are plenty of "open" devices out there already, and there has yet to be a single report of anyone taking down a cell tower with their mobile phone.

But, much more to the point: the point of copyright is not to protect us from terrorists taking down cell towers. If we, as a country, are relying on the DMCA to protect us from terrorists who don't want us making phone calls, we've got bigger problems. Even if it were true that terrorists could take down cell towers with an open mobile phone, does anyone actually think they'd shy away from doing so because it violated the DMCA? It's not like that's going to make much of a difference at all. It's entirely meaningless to the question of whether or not legal buyers of a mobile device should have the right to place whatever legal software they want on the device.

Filed Under: copyright, dmca, exemption, iphone, open, terrorism

Senate Wants To Exempt Banks From Patent Infringement Lawsuit

from the why-an-exception? dept

The Senate seems to be really into granting immunity these days. Most folks know about the decision to grant telcos immunity for possible violations of the law, but in a much less well publicized situation, the Senate has moved to grant banks immunity from an ongoing patent lawsuit (found via Against Monopoly). While I agree that the patent seems questionable, and the impact on banks would be burdensome, it's ridiculous that the Senate would carve out a special exemption for banks (and apparently, as it stands now, taxpayers would have to pay the patent holder instead -- though, the Senate is trying to change that). It's nice that Congress has noticed that the patent system is broken here, but rather than fixing the actual patent system, their response is just to exempt one class of companies from one particular lawsuit? As reader Rich (who also submitted this item) pointed out: "If this goes through, every big industry will just pay off/lobby their friendly neighborhood Congressman to exempt them from specific patents. Too bad Vonage didn't do this before being forced to pay millions for weak patents."

Filed Under: bank, exemption, patents, senate